Visiting Israel in the spring?
March, April, and May are the spring months, and they make for a very interesting visit here in Israel.
Advantages
Holidays
Not just Jewish holidays this time. Christian holidays as well.
Jewishly speaking, we have the holiday of Passover in April usually. Sometimes it even coincides with the Christian holiday of Easter. In 2020 these both coincided with Ramadan. That’s a lot of holidays, and definitely one heck of an experience. You’ll see a lot of Israelis traveling during Passover, get to experience the strange food restrictions we have during this week, and see how the grocery stores deal with it.
Flowers
Israel is in full bloom towards the end of March and April. And we’ve got quite a large variety of flowers to show off here. You’ll see them growing along the highway, in the cities, and especially if you go hiking.
Cats
We have an absurd amount of cats here in Israel, and Spring is when they reproduce. So in addition to seeing lots of cats, you’ll likely see a lot of kittens as well!
Water
In the spring it’s generally warm enough to do water hikes, raft down the Jordan river, and enjoy the waterfalls here in Israel. Spring is also when Israelis generally open “beach season” so bring your bathing suits!
Disadvantages
More people
After mid-March, tourism starts picking up again, so it slowly becomes more and more crowded. So much so that to me, May really falls into the summer category already. . There are also a lot of pilgrims making their way here during this time period with the Jewish and Christian holidays. This makes it slightly more crowded than in the winter, and the stream of people steadily increases until it peaks in the summer months.
Weather
The weather here is crazy in the spring. It hasn’t made up its mind as to whether it’s winter or summer, so you’ll have one day where it’s 40+C (over 100F) and the next it’ll be close to freezing. In 2020 towards mid-May we had an entire week where the temperatures were above 40C (over 100F). A week later I was wearing a sweater.
You might luck out though and get a week of “normal” weather.
Conclusions
When visiting Israel in the spring, make sure you check the weather forecast when packing. And then just bring some of everything. The weather forecast is never as accurate as you want it to be!
And exploring Israel in the spring is absolutely lovely!